THE SECRET ART

OF

PHOTOMORPHOSIS

"The human body is, above all, a constellation of points of fire
from which crystals radiate." Jacques Herold  

There is always the Wedding Night that prefigures the golden hour, the central inclusion running like a myth through the interior landscape, where the real and the imaginary come to feed at the same table, bathe in the same water and embrace under the same light. This interior model, at the heart of photomorphosis, provides the most desirable place, the Red Table, upon which all things are conjured...

The interior model, as the Czech surrealist Jan Svankmajer says: "is shaped by both conscious and unconscious elements. The impulse coming from the world around (from reality) is treated in the unconscious boiler of an internal laboratory to which I have no access. Inspiration is, then, the doorbell to the door of a house which tells me that the internal model is ready and I can come up and collect it. During the course of this process the pre-product emerges into the conscious several times for a moment to form further reality impulses so that it may once more submerge itself below the surface back to the unconscious where it carries on its work. I cannot control the rhythm of this process until the moment when that little bell rings."

He continues, by saying: "In my work, like the old alchemists, I am continually distilling the water of my experiences - from childhood, my obsessions, idiosyncrasies, anxieties - in order that, with this process, the heavy water of knowledge essential for the transmutation of life, begins to flow."

In 1973, I discovered the process of photomorphosis, and simultaneously invented the terms: "photomorph", "morph" and "morphing" to best describe the activity and results of this process, which became both the portal through which I entered into a dialogue with the interior model and the exit through which revelations entered the light of day. The "Wedding Night" is the primary solution, the morphological space within which all male and female elements communicate, mingle and synthesize in a dark field of stars.

The "Red Table" is where the process works its magic by speeding up the landscape and the beings that have come, like the sun when it moves a little closer to the earth, to linger a while longer into the evening. Here the movement is both frenzied and haunted, like caressing a phantom lover who never stops dancing. This is that "certain point in the mind where..." as André Breton said, "life and death, the real and the imaginary, past and present, the communicable and the incommunicable, the high and the low, cease to be perceived as contradiction."

*

 

The arrival of the Wedding Guests signals the movement of the Secret Art, and the precise moment when the lovers’ hands are dipped into the darkest, deepest solution of the luminous body of the Photomorphose. It is the moment of the eclipse and the utter stillness that verges on hysteria… The moment when the body is the veil perceived in the mind; where the body of perception, unlike the human body, except on rare occasions, is mostly a transparent vessel with a deafening hum, a disorienting glow and an endless gaze that changes its shape in an instant… it’s flesh is consciously chosen for one reason and unconsciously selected for quite another. The Secret Art is the shadow of the golden hour.

On the Red Table in the center of the Wedding Night, the sun is a reflection of the wolf when it comes to lick your face…

 

A Precise Poetic Introduction  

The great black stone is pulled out of the belly of the shark, and the taking of pictures begins. Like a wildly swinging rainbow coaxed out of night's fearful prism with a delicious eye, this camera obscura, this catcher of internally generated flashes of light, tears its tripod out by the roots and begins its delirious reconnaissance of the unknown. The camera enters the dream and is torn to shreds. But that was yesterday... Now the crystals are coming together, now the insects are reconstructing the light, now beasts are scratching at the vortices, and now the wind seals the whole thing with its blood. The witches have smeared their 'flying ointment' over it, sorcerers divine by it and madmen look into its future... The camera obscura is a man and woman lying down to make love.

 

DEFINITION

Photomorphosis is the enchanted process by which an organism changes, or experiences metamorphosis under the influence of light... It is a natural process in the realm of photosynthesis, photolysis, etc., indicating the importance of light on living things. As an external organic process entering another level of meaning, it became an internal manifestation of an evolving morphology of the psyche.

Under the sway of obsessive desire, I combined the words photograph and metamorphosis to signify the photomorphic process, without realizing that such a word already existed. But, further research revealed that photomorphosis was no longer used by the scientific community to denote the organic process of light-induced metamorphosis, and had been replaced by photomorphogenesis. Thus, by my investigation I have given a new meaning to the abandoned word 'photomorphosis'... by surrealizing it. To paraphrase Breton: photomorphosis has been given to me to make surrealist use of it.

The sustained investigation of the imagination, raised to the level of delirious curiosity, by introduction of the activity of looking inward to discover, or in effect, to shed light on, to illuminate, becomes a perfect analogy of the photomorphic process... The depths of the imagination open, the fields widen, things become visible... and metamorphosis is inevitable.

  Dreams are the Guardians of Sleep...

 

 

With Max Ernst, the art of collage became a weapon of desire. In his work there is the awareness of the interpenetrating resonances and frequencies of things, of diverse actualities aroused by the dissolving limitations of reality as it appears. He rightly proposes "the alchemy of the visual image."  With the Photomorph this weapon reached for a more radical blending of the real and the imaginary. In a frenzy of desirable attractions and unreasonable possibilities, things, beings and objects relinquish their familiar appearances... they have all already begun the process of transformation, long before they are recognized and chosen. No longer a matter of simple juxtaposition, displacement or disruption, the photomorph is a pure and unrelenting fusion of many realities, where the field of experience disrobes and unravels the thread of appearances... At the intersecting points of a strange design, a dream design, a design pulled out of the dream by it's threads.

A little before midnight, in a darkened office building, on August 17, 1973, while surreptitiously making a copy of a magazine illustration on a copier, I accidentally moved the illustration and discovered the hidden life of things just beneath the surface. Totally drawn into and fascinated by this sudden encounter, I began to explore this new way of seeing things. Tearing pages out of magazines, almost at random, I began "playing" with them on the copier, while it recorded my activity. I would combine illustrations, crumble them up and crush them, all the while moving them at various speeds. I was engaged in some new and strange form of magic, or physical nonverbal incantation, gesturing with these illustrations, even setting fire to them...

Movement became a means of delirious navigation, an almost somnambulant involvement with what cannot be seen and a pursuit analogous to searching for water with a divining-rod. Searching for the underground currents, the "heavy water", the golden serum. Taking hold of those things and moving them, as they've never been moved before... allowing them to move magnetically on their own, as if in a trance and drawn by sirens. While the flashes of light from the copier capture strange patterns, new conditions and striking transformations reveal themselves. The ordinary was changed into something extraordinary. The unknown became visible. I felt an almost symbiotic relationship with the machine, in that it became a device for recording my unconscious desires, glimpses of other worlds and other ways of being... This "machine" had become the alchemist's furnace, the Athanor, where all the elements are perfected. A door had been opened, the machine made for relatively easy access to what was elsewhere.

Landscapes and architectural forms, anthropological studies and astronomy all merged into one perception; scientific discoveries and diagrams, archaeological burial grounds, the haphazard chiaroscuro of drapery and gowns, the naked female form in all its splendor, became solutions that mixed so easily in the vessel of photomorphic reconnaissance. I seduced them, played with them and then destroyed them, only to bring their new shadows and reflections, their new desires and revelations back to life again, seeing them for the very first time.

With photomorphosis I discovered the prime material, a rich treasure of desirable possibilities... I had unleashed my own unique source material. Collage became a hungry receptacle, a kind of waking dream, yet filled to overflowing with all that was not known, never seen before and shimmering with otherworldly presence. My perception of reality had been radically changed and I became an explorer in a new land. Light and dark, movement and non-movement, interior and exterior all combined in an inevitable and highly charged space of magnetic attractions.

 

Collage is not collage, but the menace of wolves

 

Women became star-clusters that dawned in the spinning wheel of blood-filled doorways, and flowered in the compass of ancient civilizations, more wolves than streams, more flame than memory... Each human presence spread out in plant flowering, dripped with mineral inclusions and stalked the night with light-filled eyes... They howled, whispered, whined, cooed and splashed. They regrew their tails, and licked themselves; threw light off the facets of their prisms and eclipsed. They brooded over golden eggs... the psychosomatic eggs of an open window... transparent eggs...

The movement of the wolf stalking its prey, becomes the instinctual dance unleashing the phases of the moon. The frenzied gathering for the Wedding Portrait forms the water of dreams into the shapes of desire. Imaginary solutions to actual events bring stars to the marrow and place the vanishing point in the middle of a thought, between the shadow and its weapon, between the serpent and its specter. Here, every whisper gives off sparks, every kiss blackens the sun and moves by veins through the conscious glass of ‘more than just here’ and ‘always more than there’.

 

Madness to the Method

Movement is the key to the process... Movement, both wildly delirious and calmly sensuous, exploratory and guided by lunatic lights, slips of the mind and sudden lapses in orientation. Cryptic and magical movements following their own prey, in their own space and time... By moving things on the glass of the copier, while the machine illuminates and captures this movement, this almost prurient gesticulation, I enter into a phase of temporary communication with the things that I move and their desire to become something else. The unknown is moved into the light of day, into perception and recognition. The movement of things translates into a hunt for that "space" where the essence of things becomes visible.

The city of Prague is pushed up against a wedding dress, while simultaneously crushed by sunlight on water and then moved in a manner most suggestive of caressing a naked body... while constellations enter into the dance, passing through, moving very fast and then plunged into an exposed burial ground, bones glowing with memory and sudden exaltations. The whole is molded as with an invisible clay that becomes soluble at dusk and shaped in desire till it flares up. This "movement" guided by hysteria on the surface of water, is the phantom beast, the white wolf of childhood and the great horned owl of sulphur dipped in mercury. Divination unravels the structure of things moving too fast to be seen. Water, water burning bright...

 

A Pathology of Movement

The primary properties of movement are: Unseen, Unexpected, Violent, Obscene, Seductive, Enchanted and Impending. Their individual velocities revolve around a systematic engendering of hallucination, as a means to attract the darkness into the light. These properties assume their shapes according to the manner in which they pass through passionate hybrid fascination. To further heighten the transparency they seek, each is in possession of the interchangeable male/female qualities and attitudes of human, animal, bird, insect, plant and mineral... and often, stars can be glimpsed deep in shifting veils of sensory reflections; in pools of black fur, the light from inside out. Earth, air, Fire and Water form the portal of transparency. With regards to this conjuration, everything hangs in the balance. 

 

The Movements Unseen: Aleatory movement by which luminous bodies meeting for the first time leave their shadows behind like the sparks of a secret language. Unexpected: A sudden, unsettling movement of flickering eyelids that flood out over the landscape with clairvoyant threads. Violent: Projective movement which counterbalances the wolf with its prey in the glow of bathing lunatics. Obscene: An elegant movement in which the apparition of a starlit night breathes out crystals that merge with the earth in gowns of fire. Seductive: Transparent movement out of which the light that strikes the eyes of beasts enters into the body of water when it dreams. Enchanted: A dissolving movement that burns in the doorway of lovers more dangerous even than murderers. Impending: A revelatory movement between singing and sleeping that generates a pure breath out of the bones of children.

 

Hallucination of Movement

The convulsive phases of movement engage both the light and the dark in a joyous exhalation of the mind through the body... The fire burns in the water, while the night begins to glow with each passing moment. He is the darkened sun in a lunar gown, and She, the ruby of witch's milk in the prism of dawn... They multiply in a bloody fountain, while their shadow plays "dream" with the moon's golden salamander. They are the beings of lighted water, the luminous vessels... inhaling the body through the mind.

A reflection going backwards, turns around, each movement passing into the next. The animals pass through our shadows, clawing out stars. When the female spreads her legs, she is a dark pool disturbed by desire… she devours her lover with light, teeth touching, almost breaking. The Photomorphose enters in through the window.

The soft clicking sounds (behind), the deafening “movement” of images on water, and the distant howling (ahead), the heavy breathing (outside), of knowledge, hunger and transparency… There is an animal substance in the gaze, a glowing presence that yields the veil of appearances… reveals us through our absence. The ape is a doorway through which one passes in a rush of sparks.

Malcolm de Chazal says, in The Revelation of Night, that: "The shadow moves and does not move, since the shadow is the body of night, and the night cannot move. Thus the shadow which moves and does not move puts the night everywhere, even in broad daylight." The visual analogy of an animating spirit that informs the Secret Art of Photomorphosis, revolves round this "movement of things which do not move" and provides an entrance into the photomorphic process, placing that entrance "everywhere, even in broad daylight."

 

 

Strange Encounter...

 

There are those aspects of being that move faster than the speed of light and thus cannot be seen. To enable capture, I must move just as fast. Then, at the right moment, when the object comes into view and moves close, one must be very cautious and move so slow that movement becomes the silent urging of desire... One must, at that moment, stop looking, because to look is to turn into stone and lose the essence.

Moving up against, folding into, crumpling and tearing up, setting on fire... the friction of rubbing ignites and draws into, enfolds into itself all that comes close, as if to feed. All is destroyed and the remains are fire-washed in blood's moonlight... the motion is captured in the photomorphic map; the map of perceptual cross-pollination. What can be seen is not there and what is invisible moves in another direction... The wind swirls above the compass-points...

The everyday miasma of ordinary reality, the prime material, became a source of marvelous unraveling, fantastic unfoldings... new growth in the underbrush of possibilities. I wanted to include everything and began the transformation of bones, pieces of charred metal from a foundry furnace, and stones (all placed and moved as adeptly as possible so as not to break the glass! Ah, but therein lies the dialectic: with certain things, how I wanted to break the glass, how often I imagined breaking the glass!), feathers, water and even the clothing of a loved one... and then, later, in a moment of abandon, I set fire to things. I wanted to capture my desires, so I closed my eyes and formed them in the air.

 

Imaginary solutions to actual events

When the machine is turned on and the humming begins, the veils of night part and spin out of control. A supernatural breath communicates with the tiny granules of ink-black toner and weds them to the clairvoyance of elemental particles from here to there and back again, deeper in the mind than stars. The image has vanished, replaced by the disquieting sense of the image... a tangible substance to be shaped. This is the phantom space (as a perception of reality many times removed, and seen from a distance) that one grapples with, attempts to seduce with nearly obscene gestures, whispered possibilities of delight, and endless temptations. One must be relentless, like a lover in a mirror whose sexual reflection follows you everywhere, like a shadow in the blade of a sword. Then, ever so slowly, the eyes begin to open... eyes that have not been opened in a thousand years.

THE RED TABLE

The memory of a childhood activity made manifest a desirable reconciliation... My sister and I would steal small boxes from our Great Aunt's bedroom, which contained, to our delighted eyes, a myriad of objects like jewelry, keys, watches, glass eyes, marbles, lighters, teeth and trinkets of every kind imaginable, and we would spread out these glittering objects underneath the dining room table, whose cloth came down almost to the floor, letting in just enough light to illuminate our treasure with an eerie, almost otherworldly glow.

Many years later I discovered that the ordinary copy machine was a great facilitator for opening the door to this lost world of childhood and bringing it out into the daylight of the present, into the real world, by placing it on top of the table (the glass of the copy machine)... where I flooded the darkness with light. I was a child again playing with magical things. The table being an analogy for the alchemist's work table where the prime materials are transformed; the magician's or shaman's table or ground where the objects of power are assembled... The flashes of light from the copier, in unison with the mind's sparks of disruption and recognition, capture the sudden stirring of phantom forms. Attracted to being watched, they respond by returning the gaze, and are thus provoked into further change...

Seeing into the depths was as important as being seen, being looked at, watched and observed...

My work is merely a reflection of the interior process of transformation, and at the same time, it is a vehicle that aids in that process. It is a dual activity going on simultaneously: the exterior gesture of photomorphosis, the collage, and the unceasing interior activity of the psyche. Those are the communicating vessels, their essences pouring back and forth between each other, always changing, influencing and revealing.

Everything becomes anything else, as I rescue the ordinary from its confines, and watch as desirable attractions are formed... New desires of the hive summon earthquakes for honey, breathing guides forest fires through the mythologies of the Glass-Breakers. What is the secret then, as I enchant only those things which catch my eye and place them where they've never been before? Or am I merely taking photographs in the dark?  

 

ANCIENT SOLUTIONS OF PLEASURE ARE TURNING BLACK

During the Wedding Night, the owl burst out of the King, shedding light on the surrounding landscape. The Queen takes in the shadow and gives birth to reflections from the future. The androgynous Child plays with its magical thorns, grooming itself with the threads of a dream... a being lighted from within, it illuminates the Magician with the shapes of it's language. Time is the ruby when it ignites, the emerald when it vanishes...

The great crystal resonates in its unceasing self-germination, while the vast gears of night slowly grind down to a halt and the beings of lighted water move forward to whisper: "The Wedding Guests have arrived... they are coming to touch you."

*

On the Red Table can be seen the place far below the surface of our particular perception of reality, where all things imagined come to groom each other... like virginal stem cells before they metamorphose in the glow of recognition and become the reflections above, that we've come to know and love, and watch die...

The sorceress comes to me and tears out my eyes, and she whispers to me: "Now you can see that light shimmering in the vessels..."

The light vampires...

The Shaded World

AND THE FUTURE POSSIBILITIES OF REALITY AND DREAM
FORMING AN ALLIANCE AS A PHANTOM BEAST
IN THE RAPIDLY MATERIALIZING THEATRE OF THE HOLOGRAPHIC PARADIGM

It remains necessary, at all costs, to extend the field of vision; which points to Pierre Petiot's paraphrasing of Breton's statement concerning Matta: "The need to call upon the support of the most modern resources, (even those of science), simply expresses the aspiration to extend the field of vision." The Image in the field of subatomic particles; the Object in the realm of quantum physics; The Great Transparent Ones from the standpoint of Morphic Resonance and the holographic paradigm, etc. But the ultimate goal is to drive the imagination far beyond the concerns of mere science and speculation; beyond the trivial pursuits of "Art" and make it real.

Marcel Duchamp called Matta: "the most profound painter of his generation," saying further, that "His first contribution to surrealist painting, and the most important, was the discovery of regions of space until then unknown in the field of art." What is called for is the discovery of regions of space unknown in the field of being; to extend the dream, to step outside of the dream... Matta says: "The power to create hallucinations, is the power to exalt life."

The distance between everyday perception of reality, and the unfettered imagination, is the distance between the lost limb and the hand that scratches it; between the child sleepwalking in the garden and the place he actually sees himself in. It is this "distance" that becomes the movement of things (and beings) that begin to fade and emit light as rain on earthly space. They pass through each other...

*

 

There is only the singular importance of a lucid frenzy, aimed in its suddenness to rearrange, to synthesize and clarify; to extract the golden slurry and render transparent.

*

Marilyn Ferguson speaks of a certain kind of movement, when she proposes a “mathematical construct of reality by interpretation of frequencies from another dimension...”

As Allan T. Williams explains: "The four known fundamental forces in our material universe that affect all tangible and intangible forms of matter are electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force and gravitation.

The Holographic Paradigm postulates that a fifth fundamental force is the preexisting nonmaterial physical energy of consciousness itself...

Just as visible light is embedded within and represents only a limited portion of the full electromagnetic spectrum, so is relative human consciousness embedded within and represents only a limited portion of the full continuum of phenomenal consciousness."

*

David Bohm says that: “The tangible world of our everyday lives is an illusion, like a holographic image. Beneath that is a deeper order of existence, a more primary level of reality that gives birth to all objects and appearances of our physical world.”

*

Democritus, as Alexander Roob suggests, in The Hermetic Museum: "traced all phenomena capable of being experienced by the senses, including colors, back to movements and changing combinations of minute particles without quality, which he called atoms... (an) atomic reality behind the illusory world of appearances..."

*

"In the field of art," writes André Breton, "a work can be considered surrealist only in proportion to the efforts the artist has made to encompass the whole psychophysical field (in which the field of consciousness constitutes only a very small segment). Freud has demonstrated that at those unfathomable depths there reigns the absence of contradiction, the relaxation of emotional tensions due to repression, a lack of the sense of time, and the replacement of external reality by a psychic reality obeying the pleasure principle alone."

Diabolical Molestations...

Delirium of the Fire-Games...

Let us Prey...

A Key To the Field

Sometime during the early summer of 1971, the exact day I cannot recall, while on a train from Florence to Zurich, I was looking out across the Lake of Lucerne... the sun, just above the mountaintop in the distance, cast it's sparkling on the surface of the lake. Suddenly, for only a few brief moments, time itself seemed almost to slow down to a stop, I found myself not only looking intently at this landscape, but, at the same moment, looking inward at it as well. My field of perception had infinitely expanded to such an extent that exterior vision and interior vision had merged and become simultaneously apprehended on a single plane.

I was "looking" in two directions at once, at the same landscape... the profound difference being that the other direction, the one behind me, or inside, was vastly larger and much brighter, more infinite in relation to the exterior view and just as real. Yet, even though I can only describe this experience as if having another pair of eyes opened behind the eyes on my face, looking inward, it was indeed a single, all-inclusive vision... In other words, there did not seem to be a distinction between the two, no boundary or division between interior and exterior; it was all one.

I was struck by the realness of it and it's absolute clarity. Also, I should indicate that this experience was naturally occurring and not attributable to the influence of any drug... nor was I dozing, or asleep and dreaming. It was such a profound experience that everything else, since then, seemed to be utterly lacking... and I have never been able to duplicate it naturally. But it did appear to have opened a door somewhere... because very soon after I discovered the secret art of photomorphosis.

*

"The red sun rises over a city and landscape. Aurora, or dawn, indicates the moment when light and dark are not yet separated into two distinct entities," as Salomon Trismosin writes in the original 16th Century alchemical text Splendor Solis; and as Adam McLean writes in his commentary on a 21st Century translation of the same text: "The forces above have been incarnated in earthly substance, but have, in a sense, died through this process... the interface, the border between conscious and unconscious, has dissolved. The conscious, radiant part of the soul has entered into the unconscious realm, which itself, now like a dark sun, makes its forces felt in the conscious sphere."

The Shaded World II

MYSTERIES OF ALCHEMY, SURREALISM AND "THE VISIONS"
IMPLICIT IN THE PHOTOMORPHIC METHOD,
STEM CELLS AND STARS IN THE MARROW

The physical activity of Photomorphosis, both projected inward and reflected outward, is neither conceptual nor symbolic, but analogous to actual events and conditions, concrete and unsettling. A full participation of the fundamental forces of the natural world in conjunction with the personal spectrum that is the psyche, combine in a whirlwind of demonic dance... "It is all outside, but at a very deep level..."

While the locus of photomorphosis is pure automatism, its meridian is eroticism, and the measure of seeing is as much hallucination, as intoxicated imagination which, by its very nature is, in darkness solarized, seduced into disbelief, stripped naked and cannibalized, licked, suckled and mixed passionately into a magical substance, a marvelous solution to be smeared all over the body as if in a dream with eyes wide open. The glow of lunacy as a means of navigation... The exquisite passivity of the vampire's prey...

It is this which gives impetus to our splendid revolt against every formality, that impels us perhaps deeper than we've ever imagined into this alien world we once sought to escape, and restores to us that imperative, that intoxication of refusing to participate in the games of a dying world.

  *

The disruption and displacement, the bursting apart, the tearing asunder and the destruction alluded to, or inherent in the transformation of the prime material, are all more correctly described as a rendering transparent and soluble, acting in accordance with magnetic attraction and a joining together as in a potion... The more visible manifestation being that of an alchemical wedding, a fusing together, as in the act of copulation when, at the moment of orgasm, there is only a pure release of pleasure...

It became my intention to move as far away from "art" as possible; to excuse myself from all the mundane and boring reasons for making art and, as with science, "to drive the imagination far beyond the concerns of mere science and speculation", and make it real... (But then, today, one might be more prone to ask: "What is real?" and then, not be able to answer without betraying themselves. As Joseph Beuys said, in one of his better moments: "The mind is part of the exterior world, too, except it isn't visible. The mind is the one element that includes the universe.") A parallel can be seen in Alchemy, when it evolved from its classical state into its symbolic realm: it became less of a search for physical gold and instead, more of an inward quest and an intense liberation (a metamorphosis) of the spirit. The visual imagery of alchemy (and surrealism) suggested a destruction of "things as they are" and a replacement with "things as they could be"... or, perhaps, it might be more correct to say: "things as they really are, when we are not looking at them."

It is not a question of expression at all, but a means of knowledge and discovery. Likewise, the intensity of my identification with photomorphosis, as a state of being, as an object or means of exploration, was such that it became an extension of my personality... with or without the use of the copy machine.

I have never dreamed about anything in my work, nor have I ever imagined anything like it... it is not planned in any way, but rather forms itself out of the darkness. You will not find in my work what I have dreamed, or thought, or desired, whom I've loved or how I've struggled to attempt real life... only my navigations through the unknown, through the latent and implicate essence of germinating realities.

My work is a reflection of the interior process of evolution, or transformation. At the same time, it is a vehicle that aids in that process, reflecting on it and bringing it to light, it becomes tangible. It is all a matter of perception, and the attempt to alter, or change that perception... The work is a visual record of those attempts.

New Desires of the Hive...

Approaching the imagination fully armed

Movement was the means by which I subverted the ordinary copy machine and turned it into a weapon, against the very society that created the copy machine, against the mundane and the ordinary, and used to capture the marvelous.

As Herbert Marcuse has written: "The work of art cannot be comprehended in terms of social theory, neither can it be comprehended in terms of philosophy. Art has its own language and illuminates reality only through this language. (It) communicates truths not communicable in any other language: it contradicts... What appears in art as remote from the praxis of change demands recognition as a necessary element in a future praxis of liberation... Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world."

The Wedding Guests Have Arrived

One afternoon in 1979, Philip Lamantia, the great surrealist poet, asked me if I would provide a photomorph for the cover of his book of poems: Becoming Visible. I went to work immediately and, simply by turning on the machine, the very air about me seemed to come alive with whispering. In a frenzy of anticipation I tore out illustrations from National Geographic magazines, and fashionably dressed women from Vogue and Bazaar. When the machine signaled its readiness I began, as I have always begun since the beginning, spinning into enchantment the invisible forces, the waves and elements, the visible needs and desires of base materials, cupping between my warm, almost burning hands the rapidly accelerating miasma, inhaling and exhaling...

I recall the birth of this one very simple image more than any other, because of the haunted atmosphere surrounding it, the magical correspondences that were at work and the hallucination of the "arrival" of those hybrid messengers called The Owl People. They were the harbingers of revelation. Those who brought things into being, who directed, as it were, the shaping of desire.

Later, when cutting out (separating) and setting (integrating) the most important parts onto the ground, the dazzling bits of treasure I extracted (chose) and arranged on, what is not, or erroneously thought of as the foreground, but on the magician's table, the Red Table, where these things seek their own pleasure of being and form themselves.

But then silence, after such an auspicious beginning; everything stopped, as if waiting... The ground had been laid, and I knew it wasn't finished. What was needed, I could only imagine. I was uneasy for several days, agitated and distracted. Every time I looked at the image, the words: "Come closer, come closer, " came into my mind. Finally, after three days, when I resolved to force myself into a state of calm, and what I can only describe as a distant sensation of visual listening or an awareness of impending arrival, and to make myself immaculately available, did something happen...

I was sitting in the living room looking through a recently acquired book about owls, those supremely supernatural creatures... when suddenly the air once again came alive with the sound of whispering, and sunlight came in through the windows like honey, flooding over everything. I was overwhelmed by the sense of presence in the room. I seemed to be seeing tall, robed figures "becoming visible" before me, out of their own darkness. Though they never fully materialized, they were there and they were real, and the words that came to mind were: "The Wedding Guests have arrived..."

I knew in an instant who these beings were and what I had to do. I rushed into the studio and began subjecting pictures of owls to the whirlwind of the machine. I cut out several heads and fixed them instantly in the right places. These were the Owl People, the messengers and guides between here and there. They were the ones who unveiled the Red Table and made it ready for the Wedding Night...

When this photomorph arrived at Lamantia's door, as he later told me, he had just finished writing the lines:

 

Shamans at Mount Diablo touched by antlers of light

Invisible bears crowding the coast of almond shell vestments

I'm at the owl haunts of the sacral redwood grove

 

 

The Weddings Guests have arrived...

 

 

A PHOTOMORPH IN SEVEN VESSELS

"I ask for the profound, the veritable occultation of surrealism."

The magical art of Photomorphosis involves the inward dismantling of the world; the dissolving, evaporating, distilling and refining of matter... the fiery drowning, the murderous flowering... A crystal clear darkness of being is wrought by a poetic sadomasochism.

You touch her shadow with excruciating tenderness, with a scalpel, you play with it and make it hum, seduce it into tiny little circles that spin with ever-increasing speed... One drop of its unsettling cobalt purity is placed on the surface of her voice, and her pleasure is a handful of golden dust tossed into the air... Strange dreams are inevitable...

Knowledge is a mirror held up in darkness... and the destruction of memory (at the core of which, dazzling and mysterious, is the presence of an "I" that might not really be there, where it seems to be, but elsewhere), is the process of becoming transparent and more all inclusive...

She is the slender tripod of intrauterine stars that drip like blood down onto the central feasting place, in the heart of which tomorrow is but a memory... a glowing carcass of an unspeakable dance...

The art of the coven, the ceremony, the ritual, the nuptial and the game... erotic delirium of sudden encounters, newly transformed according to the desire of the beings and objects that have come to inhabit their own space and time.

"I am the pool of brightness around the dark solution; dip your hands into it and smear it over your body, wreak havoc on the tide that binds, and mesmerize... pierce it, and myth it... take away its life and give it moonlight, then revive it and breathe it in..."

A carnival of the imagination, an erotic spectacle, a singular alchemy of the marvelous...

When you rub the animal of her ghostly flesh, sunlight comes in through a flaw in the earth like honey, is poured back and forth between her twin daughters "Sinister" and "Hallucination", and the flame that results is like an invisible web draped over the landscape... When you speak to her, it is an eloquent dive...

Photomorphosis is the result of an absolute belief in the transformative power of the imagination.

She is the center of The Bewitching Ceremony, which is both diurnal and diluvial, and forms the crystallized scaffolding that arouses the space around it with its turbulent thoughts... like clairvoyant limbs, like vessels, like doorways through which can be seen the glittering forms of the wedding night.

The imagination is a flaw in the universe through which things pass back and forth along the luminescent fibers of desire, between interior and exterior, between this world and others...

'The whole is complex, varied and startling. It is alive, it makes your hair stand on end. The mastery of fire, the cardinal and intercardinal points, the activation of the interior sun called solarization, the spell-casting birdlike dance, the skeletal buzzing... the exchange of rubies and emeralds for links to supernatural places. The tripartite zoning on the glowing field, representing masculine and feminine, procreation and regeneration. All comes under the rubric of magical transport...'

The imagination is always an incessant projectory towards the future, and an evolutionary process, or force... In that respect it is a subversive activity... its aim is nothing short of a fervent reconciliation of conflict, a ruthless fulfillment of desire, and a drive toward absolute freedom.

On the Red Table the witch disrobes in a field of stars... She is coaxing out the luminous glow of "Here and There", pulling it upward and shaping it, caressing it, making love to it and spreading it out in every direction... ascending and descending the vertical plane with its moist black fur, folding it inwards, throwing it in transparent sheets that shimmer and reflect the psychological inclusions...

The imagination is neither moral nor immoral, striking out into territory which has no need for such distinctions or distractions. It fears neither life nor death, but conspires with them in the illusion of space and time. It has no restrictions and follows exclusively the pleasure principle... Nor is it constrained to logical modes of perception... Its reality is ever changing and capable of the most far-fetched solutions.

Photomorphosis is an instrument of the imagination... a dangerous instrument, a weapon...

The magical art of Photomorphosis is an art of the perverse... the veiled-eroticism of the spirit, unsettling and desirable. It reaches for the realm of prurient delights as it roams, and caresses the earth, air, fire and water of the imagination. It contains the power it represents... It becomes soluble at dawn... It refuses to go away...

Restructuring the Crystal...

The Phantom Beast

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  Ceremony of the Veil...

J. Karl Bogarte © 2001-2002 

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